Emerald - Bedford Weir

Our second day at Emerald we took a drive out to Fairbairn Dam, it is huge and a very popular spot for camping and fishing. On the way into the dam the roadway takes you over the spillway, I would not like to be going along it when they open the gates. We then decided we would go back out to Sapphire & Rubyvale to check out around the townships a little more and get an opinion on the Sapphire that Bazza acquired. After speaking with a couple of gemologist's it seems the stone is worth around $200 as it is a little cloudy, if it was a clear stone, then it's value would have been around $2,000. We also visited the Heritage Mine and watched while some tourist did some fossicking from the buckets of wash they buy for $10, they didn't seem to be having a lot of luck. We think next time we came out this way we will stay out at Gemfield which is close to gemfield's when you can fossick for yourself. While we were in Emerald we went out for an Indian meal at the Golf Club, where we had a very friendly cat rubbing around our legs while we were eating, good thing it was not "Chinese", as we became quiet attached to the cat by the time we left.
We left Emerald on Wednesday and travelled out as far as Bedford Weir which is about 20klm's in from Blackwell. We met up with some friends there that we had met at Seaforth and had a lovely happy hour with them. Don dropped his pots that night but only caught a couple of small Red Claw.

The extent of the coal mining in this area that we have travelled through is massive, evident by huge dump piles that we could see in the distance. We passed many coal trains which were on an average 1.5klms long also on the road we often had to pull over for over width mining machinery of up to 5 mtrs wide.